Tuesday, 16 May 2017

Let’s all rock to the polling station,
hop and bop and bump as a nation
back to the seventies. Let’s all wear
cheesecloth shirts and perm our hair,
dig out crombies, Ben Sherman shirts,
leather biker jackets and mini-skirts.

Let’s sleep on the beaches at weekends,
and walk down the road to call for our friends,
have school milk and uni grants for free,
buttered bread with fruit for Sunday tea,
get up to change the telly channel
and wash our faces with a flannel
in a freezing bathroom without a shower.

See hedgerows bursting with wild flowers.

Let’s listen to air waves fading at night
from Radio Luxembourg and Caroline,

dance in the youth club, hang around town,
pockets full of pennies and half crowns,
watch Monty Python and bunk off school;
the ‘Who’ generation that broke all the rules.
There was something in the air, an albatross
flying high with butterflies born at Woodstock.

So let’s get together and rock to the polls
and save the garden and save our souls,
get rid of the Tories and privatisation
and daddy-dance to the polling station!

Friday, 12 April 2013

(on the resurgence of the song 'Ding, dong, the witch is dead' on the death of Margaret Hilda Thatcher, 1925-2013)

So those in power want to ban the song.
They feel the water lap around their boots.
This time it’s someone else. It won’t be long
Before it’s their turn knee deep in the sluice.
Ding dong, the doorbell rings. Who’s at the door?
Let’s hope it’s not those badly mannered poor
With their demands of equal this and that.
God help us, now the ship deserts the rat.
The witch is dead and tap, tap here’s the wake
With fire in their eyes to light the stake.
The crone is gone, but here’s her legacy,
A world of ‘trickle up’ economy.
The wicker woman waits upon the hill
If you won’t light the kindle then they will.

Thursday, 4 April 2013

I’m very anxious nowadays whenever I go out;
it seems these new Precariat are suddenly about.
The implication is that they are lager swigging shirkers
who mix with manual labourers like cleaners and farm workers.

They rent their homes instead of buying them like decent folk
and live on less than twenty thou a year. No doubt they smoke
and take drugs too. Apparently they are quite dangerous
because their lives are unpredictable, precarious.

They are the rioters, protestors, knee-jerking despair,
without a future, without hope, a job, a life, a care.
And yet, I do not see them when I step outside my door,
the world seems just the same to my eyes as it did before.

I’ve looked under my mattress where I keep my money hid
in case the banks collapse again. I’ve looked in next door’s skip.
I’ve asked my social worker and my cronies down The Bear.
We cannot see these Precariat people anywhere